That's exactly what I said. It doesn't matter if I wrote the HTML by hand or I had a perl, or bash, or compiled c program make it. It's just an HTML file.

You're incorrect

CSS and JavaScript and images are also static, it doesn't have to be just HTML

If you have a perl or bash or c backend generating html in response to http requests it's not static

You're assuming this is a backend. It is not. Do you consider generating an HTML file in a WYSIWYG editor like, say, "Dreamweaver" that outputs an .html no longer static because it was made by a program? That's absurd.

No, that's static, that's why I said "in response to an http request"

HTML includes the content of style and script elements (among many others) and the results of whatever they do.

The combination of all of these direct a browser in how to render a page.

Traditionally, a static site or static page is one whose data can be delivered to the client directly as stored, with no server-side alterations or generation.

This is/was a meaningful distinction because a server that can stream stored data is fundamentally much simpler than one that executes programs. Such a server can run in different contexts, be optimized in different ways, and satisfies constraints that allow further optimizations downstream.

Lol no. If you HTML is generated, it's by definition not static anymore.

Otherwise, all of the React server side rendering is static HTML.

Oh, so when I make an .html file in Dreamweaver WYSIWYG HTML editor and save the .html file to my websever ~/www/ dir it is automatically not a static page anymore because I used a program to generate it? This is a very wild and weird interpretation of 'static site' that does not fit with existing usage.

You are the last person to have a say in that considering your incorrect take that JS can't be static. You're clearly misaligned with common usage of terms.

When javascript started being able to change HTML significantly the result was literally named "Dynamic HTML". So it is clear this is not a static HTML page. The only thing left to argue is weather it is a static web site. People who got into web dev after 2010 will say yes, people who watched HTML/JS evolve over it's lifetime will say no.

This is the most bizarre argument. Of course you can use build tools to generate static web pages.

The issue is whether they are being generated dynamically by a server. This project isn't. You run a build-tool once and then can post the .html page anywhere. It's static.

No, because React is dynamically generating the HTML on the fly.

If you pre-compile the HTML using something like Jekyll, so that the webserver is just serving HTML files without any dynamic/on-the-fly processing at request time, then it's considered static.

React server side rendering: most likely dynamic

React on the client side: static, as you still got the same files served, how they dynamically alter the page runtime doesn't count.

You can put client-side JavaScript fine in “just an HTML file”?

It can be html, css, javascript, whatever.

'Static' means it's only made of static files that can be served by just a vanilla Web server (i.e. just by serving static files).